Both, a timeless romance and a richly detailed social novel, North and South is Elizabeth Gaskell’s masterpiece of Victorian Literature. It is a novel of love and social strife in northern England during the industrial revolution. 

When Margaret Hale is uprooted from Hampshire and moves to the industrial town of Milton in the North of England, her whole world changes. As her sympathy for the town’s mill workers grows, her sense of social injustice awakens and she passionately fights their corner. However, just as she disputes the mill owner, John Thornton’s treatment of his workers, she cannot deny her growing attraction to him.

Highlighting the changing landscape of nineteenth-century Britain and championing the role of women in Victorian society, Gaskell brilliantly captures the lives of ordinary people through one of her strongest female characters in literature. Using personal passions to explore deep social divisions, it is one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s finest works.